need less sleep. Your brain can grow so many new brain cells that it can get measurably bigger in just three months. Your face gets more blood so you don’t wrinkle as fast. Even your sexual organs get more blood flow, similar to the way Viagra works... and so on. That really motivates people to continue. We even found that when you make these positive lifestyle changes, your genes begin to change. We found alterations in more than 500 genes within the first three months—turning on or up-regulating the disease- preventing genes, and turning off or down-regulating the genes that pro- mote disease.


You stress the importance of individual lifestyle changes, but what about changing our sick health care system?


We do need to look at the politics of health care and hold our leaders responsible for some of decisions that have created the mess we’re in. For example, after 16 years of


lobbying, working with Medicare and members of Congress, we learned a few months ago that Medicare is fi- nally covering our program for revers- ing heart disease. It’s game changing. If Medicare covers it, all the other insurance companies will follow their lead, and we can make these sorts of programs available to people who most need them, rather than just those who can afford it. If we change reimbursement, we


change not only medical practice, but also medical education. Otherwise, I could do a thousand studies with a million patients and it would always re- main on the fringes of medical practice.


For more information visit pmri.org or OrnishSpectrum.com.


April Thompson is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. See April Writes.com


January 2011 15


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